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I’ve been holding off on posting this story until today. Why? Because today is CANADA DAY. Get it? Well anyway, the Canadians loaned their CADPAT pattern technology to the US Marine Corps for MARPAT, the US Army for UCP and the US Navy for NWU I, II and III. So I guess you could call it reciprocity that the Canadians are now transitioning to a new uniform style that borrows from some of the features of the US Army ACU – it have has a similar name (ECU).

But rather than just copy the ACU design, or slightly modify it, it looks like the Canadians have added a few advancements and innovations of their own and come up with something even better than the ACU. On top of that, the Canadians aren’t having any of this silly inter-service rivalry that ends with each branch having its own uniform style and camouflage pattern. The Canadian Army, Navy and Air Force all wear the same camouflage pattern and the same camouflage uniform – what the Canadians refer to as being a “converged” design. The Canadian Special Operations Regiment does also use a more high-speed / low-drag combat uniform purportedly designed and made by Crye Precision (see our recent Friday Foto).

Word of this new Improved / Enhanced Combat Uniform has been floating around for close to a year now, but the first details of the actual design and production specification has only recently emerged – and was first published by our friends at Soldier Systems Daily. The new uniform will be produced in the CADPAT TW and CADPAT AR camouflage patterns and is scheduled to begin being issued this year.

I took a closer look at the photo of the CSOR guys. It looks like they have the standard-issue combat pants modified to have Crye Precision kneepads sewn onto them. If you look closely, one guy’s kneepads are multicam and the others are Cadpat. As for their shirts, they look like the CPGear ‘Outside the Wire’ shirt.

Custom tailoring of issued uniforms is a no-go for pretty much the entire army, but the SF guys can fudge the rules a bit 😉 Actually, when the CF deployed to Afghanistan, many soldiers had local tailors / seamstresses modify their combat uniforms to get arm pockets added to them. Our current uniform design dates back to the 60s, and it was never designed to work with body armour, hence the local mods. Eventually it became an approved thing, and I believe all Desert Cadpat combat shirts ended up with the arm pockets.

It wouldn’t surprise me. Units like CSOR and JTF-2 probably have the budget and the ability to get a custom uniform built by Crye – I just wanted to make my best guess on the kit the guys were wearing in your photo.